WORLD WORLDWIDE FRANCE MAYOTTE News Journal Update - (en) France, OCL CA #333 - Mayotte, towards a genocidal drift? (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

We explained at length the Wuambushu operation and the situation in

Mayotte in the issue of Courant Alternatif last June. We return to this
story once again. What is happening there is indeed extremely serious.
This article is written based on notes taken during a speech on the
subject at the libertarian meetings in Quercy this summer. ---- Brief
historical reminder ---- There were four Comorian sultanates, one per
island. During the first half of the 19th century, there was a major
conflict between the Sultan of Mayotte and that of Anjouan, the closest
island, which led to a request for protection from France by Mayotte.
 From 1886 until 1946, there was a single colony for the 4 islands,
administered sometimes from Madagascar, then from Mayotte. 1946, the
year of territorialization, Mayotte became the capital of the territory,
which allowed the appearance of a small civilized Mahorese bourgeoisie.
In 1958, the capital was transferred to Moroni, current capital of the
Comoros. A lobbying campaign to keep Mayotte within the French fold then
began. In November 58, all the notables, religious figures and
politicians of Mahor swore loyalty to France on the Koran. In 1974-75,
the vote was in favor of independence in all 4 islands, but there was
63% no in Mayotte. Mayotte was then dissociated.

It all happened in two months. Just after the declaration of
independence of the Comoros, there was a manhunt in Mayotte against
Comorians from other islands and pro-independence Mahorais. Abuses were
committed by soroda militias (a word derived from soldier), under the
watchful eye of the French authorities, who opposed the "shake hands",
implied to the other islands. It was then the unilateral proclamation of
the founding of a general council of Mayotte which would last until 1977
(where elections took place). No document remained in the colonial
archives from this period, marked by harassment, etc. opponents. At the
same time, there is a coup d'état in Moroni with the famous Bob Denard.
What followed were 25 years of mercenarism, 2 presidents assassinated...

Bob Denard's surrender in 95 took place when he had just dismissed a
third Comorian president whom France sent to Reunion under house arrest.
At the same time, the Balladur visa was introduced. For the first time,
Comorian nationals need an entry visa to Mayotte. Traffic doesn't stop,
except now you have to take risks. There have been around 25,000 deaths
since. The boats leave from the south of Anjouan, a 70 km journey. It's
not because people are fleeing intolerable conditions. This is because
the conditions imposed by France force them to take risks. The notion of
illegal immigration to Mayotte is indeed an absurdity.

Comorians, scapegoats
Since the 1980s, the Comorians have served as scapegoats for all the
negligence in the colonial management of Mayotte. The water problem is
the Comorians, the school problems are the Comorians, the saturation of
health infrastructure is the Comorians, the husbands who no longer want
their Mahorese wives and who find better elsewhere, it's is the
Comorians, etc. In 2003, a hamlet of undocumented fishermen on the
seaside was burned on the orders of the village mayor, 28 huts burned,
this gentleman was never worried in any way. There were wild clearing
operations with red crosses drawn on the doors of barracks and other
makeshift habitats to facilitate the work of the police in picking up
undocumented immigrants. Since then, the police have been driving around
with blue mesh trucks and charging at women, children and undocumented
Comorians, sometimes to the cheers of the population. And it's not a
question of intervening by saying it's not going well or something,
you're big fascists there, we'll get our heads taken off quickly. There
is a real hostility cultivated in Mayotte towards the other three islands.

Women have been at the forefront of the movement in favor of French
Mayotte since the late 1950s and early 1960s. This can be explained for
anthropological reasons. Mayotte, like the entire Comoros archipelago,
is a matrilineal society, it is the mother-daughter lineage which
structures the family genealogy, this matrilineality is linked to
matrilocality, that is to say that traditionally it is the mother who
owns his house, and it is the husband who comes to live in his wife's
house, and if he is polygamous he moves between the different houses of
his wives. If there is a problem, a separation, the woman disposes of
her house, it is he who will return to his mother.

And this is the reason why the popular Mayotte movement was structured
through all these networks of female, matrimonial, village sociability,
etc., which were the spearheads of French Mayotte. Before independence,
this is what we called the ticklers, as soon as they saw a notable from
the three other islands disembarking in Mayotte, at the airport, they
attacked him, they began to tickle him, to take away his shirt, to the
point of leaving him bloodless in the dust, without killing him, but it
was a harassment operation. The women who are today at the forefront of
the pro wuambushu movement in Mayotte claim to be the descendants of the
ticklers.

An identity drift
Wuambushu is not the first operation developed by the French state. In
2019, there was operation chikandra, chikandra is the name of an
extremely aggressive fish which tends to bite anyone who comes into its
navigation territory. You can already see the imagination that the name
of these operations mobilizes. In a demonstration of women in the
context of Wuambushu there were some who said to an Anjouan woman, come
on, go throw yourself into the sea. There is a whole murderous
imagination which is pre-genocidal, which surfaces in the language, in
certain practices, etc. I'm referring to Rwanda 1994, because it's
exactly the same process. The dehumanization of a supposed otherness,
the three other islands are absolutely not an otherness since they are
part of the same archipelago, there is the invention of a Comorian
otherness. From the moment it is invented, there is then its degradation
and dehumanization. It also happens through language.

And from there, anything goes. From the moment we take away the humanity
of the other, we can crush them like a cockroach as they said in Rwanda
in 1994. Wuambushu is part of this logic, this genealogy, and it is
therefore carried officially by the French state. There is no
contradiction between the procolonial policy of the French state in
Mayotte, imperialist in the Comoros, and the actions of the village
militias, the collectives which support the Wuambushu operation, which
exacerbate it, which put their hands in the dough. There were several
raids on villages. A Mahorais owner was kidnapped by a hooded commando
because he was accused of harboring undocumented Comorians. Women
identified as Comorian were freed from a small kiosk during a raid by
other women at Mayotte airport because they were selling jasmine
necklaces, which is a hospitality tradition that has become a tourist
gimmick .

The mayor of the village of Chikoni opened a free telephone line so that
the population can report any problematic situation. The word
"problematic" was used by the general of the gendarmerie in Mayotte,
when he sent his cops into clearing operations he said yes, in case
there was a problematic situation, we secure the area, etc. Another
mayor said in any case at some point we are going to give out the lists
of undesirable people. Before independence this was practiced by the
Soroda, there was a list of people suspected of being independentists
(in the sense of the other islands), and the Soroda militias went
directly to the person's home and took them out. So there is always this
idea of lists. The first president of the General Council said "At some
point, we may have to kill some." It went round and round. Estelle
Defoufa, one of the two deputies from Mayotte, in the LIOT group, speaks
of bearded babies to allude to the nationals of the three other islands
of the Comoros who are in school in Mayotte, it is a way of talking
about Comorians already pre- adolescents, but who resume in CE2, CM1.
Mansour Kamarzine, in the LR group, is a "great replacement", he adapts
the theory of the great replacement to Mayotte. For him there is a major
replacement underway of Comorians from the other three islands in
Mayotte. He is very angry against the associations that he calls
"hemiplegic human rights". He also supports a whole speech against a
certain part of the judiciary which he judges to be a sort of 5th column
preventing the Wuambushu operation from going well, since at the
beginning, before the first large slum was destroyed, there was had a
legal battle at the initiative of the president of the Court of Mayotte.
He is very upset against the magistrates, against all the associations
which intervene in Mayotte. So there is a Mahorese political class which
is unanimously in favor of Operation Wuambushu. Those who are against
the future of Mayotte do not say it, it is dangerous, even the
representative of France Insoumise in Mayotte, if he speaks too loudly,
if he starts to protest, he is politically dead, and if this is only
politically, it's okay.

... assumed by the French State
Darmanin declared "We are going to destroy the ecosystem of these
criminal gangs, and therefore we are going to destroy the bangas.»
Mahorais politicians, collectives, quoted by the press in France, say
here are 25 bangas destroyed today, etc. Le Monde translates "sheet
metal house". Traditionally, a banga is a small house, generally
decorated with cob, that the young pre-adolescent builds on the family
compound away from the maternal house at the age of 10-11 to have his
autonomy as a young boy and no longer be in contact at his age with the
sisters who remain in the maternal home. This is something very profound
in Bantu societies to avoid incest. But it also shows the full autonomy
that is granted to young pre-adolescent boys who begin to live
separately, to build themselves... At the end of the 90s, there was a
banga competition which was organized at the college, each adolescent
competed decorations. Even in 2010, the word did not have a pejorative
connotation. There is a sort of assimilation, destruction of language,
the banga is the tin shack of the Comorian immigrant. It's surprising to
see how a word which is at the very heart of the process of
individuation, of empowerment of young boys, is completely destroyed and
now becomes the dregs. All Mahorean politicians talk about it with a
pout of contempt. Perhaps thirty years ago they themselves were in a
banga. It is a destruction of the imagination and traditional frameworks
of representation which is truly extremely violent.

It tends to shake up our ideas a little when we look from here, we think
that there are two subjects, there is one which dominates, it is the
French State, and then there are dominated ones who undergo. And there,
what we must see is that on the part of a huge part of the Mahorese
population, there is an autonomy of action, an agency as the academics
say, pro-colonial which is extremely important.

Action Française is very involved in Mayotte, they did a lot of lobbying
with Chirac, Messmer, Michel Debré, the leader of Action Française
worked a lot for that, a Mahorais also from Grande Comore, whose name is
Adrien Giraud, advancing the theme of harkis. The leader of Action
Française explains to Chirac, if you let go of Mayotte, the Mahorais
will suffer the same fate as our harkis from the other three islands,
which is completely crazy. Adrien Giraud, who ran the Chamber of
Commerce for 25 years, not a small craftsman could set up his business
without getting his money's worth, also mobilized the imagination of the
harkis, if Mayotte is ever abandoned by France, we will all be killed
like harkis. There is a fear of abandonment on the part of Mayotte
vis-à-vis the French state. It's a sort of collective pathology. In
Mahorese we say the magnegné state , the tinkered state.

And when we say the Magnégné State , we are referring to the state of
the infrastructure which really leaves something to be desired, but it
is also the impression that Paris is not putting its foot down, is not
getting involved as it should, It plays into the hands of Comorian
immigrants, they are not there enough. Wuambushu has been criticized
since Darmanin's visit on June 24 and 25, because the CRS8 left Mayotte
urgently following the revolts following the death of Nahel. There has
been dissatisfaction in Mayotte, fueled by politicians, since the end of
June, with the results of Operation Wuambushu. Safi Nassoulah, the
leader of the citizens' collectives of Mayotte, says that we must send
back all undocumented Comorians, with a porosity between the terms
Comorian and undocumented, that we must clear all the boxes, a
pro-colonial maximalist discourse.

There are many traditional marriages, in front of the cadi, where it is
therefore equal between Comorians, with or without papers, Mahorais,
equality in front of the Koran. But it is not recognized as a civil
marriage. The nationals of the three other islands are thus thrown into
legal clandestinity. There is a customary code which recognizes union
and filiation, which in 2007 represented half of marriages. Civil
marriage only concerns the Mahorais. Children are not considered true
Mahorais, especially in tense times.[1]There is a psychic and
psycho-social destruction of youth due to these categorizations and this
violence against those who are designated as barbarians, a term that
Darmanin uses. When Darmanin came in June to make an initial assessment
of the operation and announce the sequel, he declared to the Mayotte la
1ère television news: "We are going to reverse the demographic curve in
Mayotte.» So he is going to make a Wuambushu of birth rates and
nuptiality in Mayotte. It is mechanically linked to expulsions. In the
same interview, he mentions the false certificates of paternity, which
would be linked to the complicity of part of the Mahorese population.
This actually surrounds mixed unions with a sort of suspicion. These
children will become in some way illegitimate, and without legal
fathers. You imagine what can happen in the head of a child whose
biological father is illegal. It is also linked to unpacking and the
notion of living space. Darmanin says that the more Comorian bangas we
destroy, the more housing we will be able to build for the Mahorais and
metropolitan residents. And the Mahorese collectives use this language.
A shanty town was razed in the commune of Kungu, and in its place there
will be a wastewater treatment plant... Another shanty town in the same
commune was crushed to build a high school there.

After which solution to propose? Even a class analysis is not easy to
get into, there is such a fiction of identity that is maintained in
Mayotte that it obscures the class disparities which are certainly
important, but like elsewhere.

Sylvie

Notes
[1]Remember that an exception to the law of soil has been provided for
in the law for Mayotte, being born there does not give the right to
French nationality

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